Clinton ignored Rwanda until it was too late
MARK STEYN
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If you want an example of a president doing nothing to prevent the best part of a million deaths, how about the Rwandan genocide? It was exactly a decade ago, and the media commemorations so far are, to say the least, low-key. The editors of The Economist wonder, "How many people can name any of the perpetrators?" I'd say it's more basic than that. How many could tell you whether it was the Hutu killing the Tutsi or the Tutsi killing the Hutu? Come on, take a guess, without looking it up.
If there's a point to the United Nations, which some of us doubt, it should surely be for the likes of Rwanda. An irrelevant basket-case state will never be a legitimate national interest for any great power. To America, Britain, France, Russia and China, it makes no great difference who's running Rwanda, or even whether there is a Rwanda. If those Hutu and Tutsi mutually hacked each other into extinction, it's their problem.
But the U.N. is supposed to represent a moral purpose
beyond crude hard-power calculations. Instead, born in the
wake of one genocide in the Balkans, it sat by and watched
another unfold. The U.N. was so serenely complacent it
couldn't even rouse itself to jam the state radio station,
through which the ruling thugs urged their teenage hackers
on in public service messages pointing out "the graves are
not yet full." So the killing continued, until some
800,000 were dead.
Bill Clinton felt their pain. Retrospectively. In 1998, on his Grand Apology Tour of Africa, a whirlwind tour of whirlwind apologies for slavery, the Cold War, he touched down in Kigali and apologized for the Rwandan genocide. "When you look at those children who greeted us," he said, biting his lip, as is his wont, "how could anyone say they did not want those children to have a chance to have their own children?"
Alas, the president had precisely identified the problem. In April 1994, when the Hutu genocidaires looked at the children who greeted them in Tutsi villages, the Hutu didn't want those Tutsi children to have a chance to have their own children. So the question is: when a bunch of killers refuse to subscribe to multiculti mumbo-jumbo, what do you do?
"All over the world there were people like me sitting in offices," continued Bill in his apology aria, "who did not fully appreciate the depth and the speed with which you were being engulfed by this unimaginable terror."
It requires especial reserves of cynicism and contempt to seek approval for feeling bad about it four years later. Whether the Bush administration could ever have put together a few random clues in time to prevent what happened on Sept. 11, Clinton knew about Rwanda and chose to do nothing.
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